Unemployment's New Face

Though more people are working than in any previous winter, unemployment has reached a critical 20-year high. Saying that, the Labor Department last week released a starburst of statistics that shed new light on the economy's darkest problem. With 7.7% of the nation's 70 million workers listed as jobless, unemployment is becoming more chronic, more widespread. Items: More than half of the nation's major industrial areas qualify as "depressed." Last week the Labor Department added 25 new urban centers to its list of areas where unemployment is a longstanding problem and 6% or more are unemployed now.* That brought the total of depressed areas to 76, out of the 150 urban centers in the U.S.

Long-term unemployment is on the rise. Gone--or going--are the days when another job was just around the corner. The number of workers idled for 15 weeks or more rose from 1,000,000 in December to 1,339,000 in January. Half of them have been jobless for more than six months.

Hardest hit are the Negroes, the very young, the unskilled. Last hired and first fired, Negroes comprise 10% of the population, account for more than 20% of the unemployed. One in three of the unemployed workers is aged 24 or less. One in eight laborers is jobless. Unemployment among married men increased from 4.3% in January 1960 to 6.1% last month.

Unemployment has hit virtually every major industry, every industrial state. Manufacturing employment is down 900,000 from a year ago. Mining employment is at an alltime low. The auto, steel, fabricated metals and machinery industries are far off their employment peaks of 1955-57. In steelmaking Pittsburgh and automaking Detroit, close to 12% are unemployed. Illinois is hurt by the slowdown in farm implement and other machinery manufacturing, Maryland and California by the decline in airplane manufacture. North Carolina and Massachusetts by the sluggishness in textiles, Pennsylvania by the slump in primary metals, coal and oil. Long-booming Texas officially calls its oil-fueled unemployment problem "the worst in 20 years." Even prosperous areas are pinched. Miami's Dade County has more jobs this year than last--but the percentage of employment increase is the smallest in a decade.

Workers are loath to leave home and look for jobs elsewhere. "There are many reasons," says the Labor Department. "Family ties, home ownership, educational facilities, pension and benefit rights, inertia, lack of assurance of opportunities elsewhere." And not many of the long-term unemployed have the money to travel far. One exception: workers laid off in small towns are moving into nearby big cities, where they simply swell the unemployment rolls.

The reason for the seeming paradox between a high job level and rising unemployment is that the World War II babies are coming of age, pouring at least a million new workers into the force this year and still larger numbers in future years--larger than the increase in jobs. With the work force expanding and productivity increasing (the number of men needed to produce a ton of steel has declined in the past dozen years from 21 to twelve), federal economists figure that this year's gross national product will have to jump from the current $503 billion to $525 billion just-to keep unemployment from rising still higher.

Despite all these bleak points, there is little destitution. When their unemployment benefits lapse, the jobless are being kept afloat by savings, city welfare benefits, church charities, veterans' pensions, railroad retirement checks and social security. Queried by TIME correspondents, employment experts around the country last week were virtually unanimous in predicting that unemployment will get worse before it gets better. Even if a boom comes soon, says the Labor Department, unemployment will roll along a high plateau of 3,200,000.

"We are in a full-fledged recession," barked Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg as he swept through five of the hardest-hit states in a headline-catching tour. "If we don't take the proper action, we'll be in a depression." Avowed purpose of Goldberg's "nonpolitical" mission was to solicit bipartisan support for President Kennedy's plan to pass a depressed areas bill, grant $1.2 billion in federal subsidies to extend the duration of unemployment benefits and aid the children of the unemployed. To a cheering audience of Gary steelworkers, longtime United Steelworkers Counsel Goldberg said grandly: "In years past I used to have some power in shutting the mills down. Now my job is to put them to work again."

* Newcomers: Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Los Angeles-Long Beach, St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo., Peoria, Akron, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, Asheville, Corpus Christi, Flint, Grand Rapids, Knoxville, Louisville, Mobile, Newark, New Brunswick-Perth Amboy, Portland, Ore., Savannah, Tacoma, Toledo, Trenton, Worcester, and York.

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